Is Microsoft BPOS down? Check the new dashboard

Microsoft has created an Online Service Health Dashboard, which will give users of its Microsoft-hosted services information on the status and status history of the various Business Productivity Online (BPOS) services.

Microsoft has created an Online Service Health Dashboard, which will give users of its Microsoft-hosted services information on the status and status history of the various Business Productivity Online (BPOS) services.

Microsoft officials announced the availability of the new dashboard, with three different URLs for different Microsoft datacenter locations, via a blog post to the Microsoft Online Services Team blog on September 27.

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The Dashboard provides the status of the current day and week for all BPOS services -- which currently means Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Communications Online and Live Meeting. There also is a historical status view, which displays the "greatest level of service degradation for the given day," according to the blog post.

Microsoft is delivering new BPOS-related features on a regular basis, and is promising a bigger "vNext" rollout in the first part of next year. Microsoft officials have said they'll make test versions of vNext services available to users in calendar 2010. The vNext versions of these services will include some of the functionality that Microsoft introduced in the software versions of the respective point products that it shipped in the past year-plus.

I also recently asked Microsoft Business Solutions Corporate Vice President Michael Park whether Microsoft had decided to shelve the "BPOS Lite" product I wrote about earlier this year. Park said that BPOS Lite is still going forward, but said it was too early to talk further about specifics.